Share this:

Everyone, it’s OK. You can calm down now. Put away your finely honed rioting tools and carefully calibrated bludgeoning instruments. Octodad: Dadliest Catch, you see, finally got the Greenlight go-ahead to haphazardly fling itself in Steam’s general direction. After flopping and flailing about in hilarious frustration for 30 or so minutes, it also managed to affix 20 other games to its tentacles – which it will now nonchalantly drag onto the storefront with it. Or maybe they were just greenlit the normal way as well, but this is how I choose to interpret the information I’ve been given.

Phew. So yes, that brings the total number of greenlit games up to 30. Sadly, however, only one – the unabashedly crass, frequently brilliant McPixel – has actually completed its Valve-assisted 38km space dive onto Steam. Hopefully, more will soon follow, as a few absences like Black Mesa and other completed mods are extremely curious. I mean, what’s the hold up? It’s been two months, and we’ve only seen a single game complete the full process. That’s just unacceptable.

If nothing else, though, the selection process is moving along at a nice enough clip. The latest batch presents a pretty decent mix of well-known and relatively obscure, too, so I can’t entirely fault the system as is. It absolutely still needs work, but some results are definitely better than none. Hopefully, soon it’ll pick up ste… stea… ABORT AWFUL PUN. ENGAGE SHAME AMPLIFICATION DEVICE. AND ALSO JETPACK.

51 Comments

And for those interested in trying Perpetuum Online out, there is an RPS corporation founded by the holy Jim of Rossignollington himself, just get the demo (which is a 14 day trial) and get in the #rps channel, in the game.

Unfortunately, there won’t be. That’s the harsh reality of indie multiplayer games. The old methods of randomly hopping online and hoping to find people playing just don’t work anymore when there are SO MANY games people can be playing these days. Unless you have a group of people you can get together at a specific time to play, it’s just not likely to happen.

Having a free to play game that gathers all potential players in a lobby and creates servers is a better method, but requires a lot of specialization in your profit model and game design, as well as cutting off customization and player ownership.

I can’t think of any easy way to make normal realtime multiplayer games easy to _casually_ setup for a small player base. Anything I can imagine would ultimately involve moving the collective attention spans of enough people over the internet at once, which these days is a fair deal more difficult than being a feline herder.

Yes, it’s quite unique in being one of the few games that actually only work in co-op, despite Guns of Icarus. Since they are going with a free-to-play model I wouldn’t be surprised to get alot of new players on release/open beta.

Postal 2 says in its description that they need about a week to get it ready for release after approval.

Miner Wars continues to sucker people in with its promises. After the atrocious Miner Wars Arena I have no real hope for the game to actually be fun. Besides, why did that have to go through Greenlight when MWArena made it onto Steam directly?

I’d love to see Bunny Must Die show up on Steam and get some actual attention but at the current rate that’s never going to happen. Well, I’ll go back to trawling Desura if I want indie games…

So, I take it you’ve not seen the latest Miner Wars beta, then? Nearly-finished game. Long singleplayer campaign. The only thing it’s really missing at this point is voicework for about half of the missions, but that’s coming. Balance tuning needs to happen too, but the game is nearly complete.

Not bad, considering the rage, accusations of the game being a front for eastern european mobsters/a scam/vaporware, and even that the developers are nazis for having a comically evil 4th reich villain faction, complete with an eyepatched air-marshall commanding a fleet of Hindenburg-class space-Zeppelins.

Actually MWA is great fun, although somewhat crippled by the lack of online multi. Methinks they stuck a little too closely to updating the original Tunneler! As a split screen two-player game though, MWA is great fun. I thought the Total Biscuit review was a bit of a wash actually, it plays much better than that if you’re not completely useless at it! ;) But yeah, it’s clearly just a fun side project that the tech was suited for. I’d have preferred it to be a free ad for the main game, but hey you gotta raise funds somehow.

Anyway, the 2081 main game is looking fantastic right now, I’m surprised it even had to go through the Greenlight process, although what I’m guessing they’re doing is using Greenlight as an advertising medium to help generate interest and sales. I’m pretty sure the game would be shoe-in if they used the normal Steam approval channel anyway.

There’s a lot of shouting in the news post. That’s to hide that the author is clearly playing favorites here! Yes, I’ve seen through your dark schemes, sir! There are subliminal messages ‘BUY POSTAL 2 COMPLETE’ all over the post.

It makes no sense really, I purchased the game on Gamersgate a week ago and has been playing since, what’s the hold up?
The way some titles are accepted to be on the storefront and others are forced into the limbo that is Greenlight feels completely random.

Steam has no other submission system at the moment – unless you’re a publisher/developer with an existing agreement to publish stuff on Steam, you HAVE to go through Greenlight.

Of all the things I’ve grumbled about, that is probably the thing which is going to do Valve the most harm – they’re playing “we’re the big guys – dance for our baying fans – if they like you, we like you” and it’s going to put some developer’s backs up.

Except of course that they will bend and break the rules as they see fit – which will probably annoy even more people.

The core ideal of Greenlight was to make their submission/approval process “more transparent” – I’d say they’d gone from ‘utterly opaque’ to ‘still pretty fucking opaque and slightly demeaning with it”.

You’re right that they can and will handle submissions as they please (and I’d like them to – it’s in their best interest that they do that) – however they’ve said they want to make the process more transparent (tho I suspect that actually means they just want to share the enormity of shit they had to review before).

On your other point tho – you’re wrong, incorrect, at fault, erroneous and other words which mean you don’t know what you’re talking about – see this

The gaming press completely failed La-Mulana. The devs/publisher sent out press releases and review copies to just about every site on the internet. Only a couple even acknowledged the game existed. Fewer reviewed it. Almost none mentioned that it was a flagship launch title for a localized indie-centric digital store.

If nobody voted for it, it’s because nobody knew about it outside of hardcore indie circles.

I’m worried what is going to happen when these games finally do appear on Steam and Steam realizes that my commitment (“Yes, I would buy this game if it were available Steam”) is rather meaningless.

To Steam: My heart is in the right place! These are games that I would want to buy if I had the time to play them. But I already have a huge backlog – a backlog that you created with all your sales! So don’t be disappointed in me for not buying these games immediately when they get Greenlit! Okay? I’m sorry!

As per my posts in the forum here, I’ve been talking to someone from Valve (prompted by my Greenlight LITE experiment stuff and blog comments) and one of the issues I raised was that the question “Would you buy this” is both meaningless without a price and availability – and worthless in terms of whether people WILL buy it.

Wording is key with things like this – I’d saying something like “Is this the sort of game you’d like to have in your Steam library” would be FAR FAR better – and they agreed that there is an issue with that.

Problem here is that what they’re asking you to do is “fill a survey” and we know how meaningless those things are at the best of times – and this survey has almost 900 questions and no free chocolate at the end of it!!